Jimi Izrael on the Black Women Not Getting Married Crisis

from his formspring account http://formspring.me/jimiiizrael:

What do you think of the media’s current focus on black women not being married?

I think it has reached a fever-pitch. I think the approach to the story/problem, to this point, has been counter-intuitive.

To wit:

If black men were as messed up as conventional wisdom (Essence Magazine) would have you believe, then they would not be attractive to any prospective partner. Yet, they manage to do ok in the marriage/dating pool. This idea that black women are loyal to the race and therefore only want to marry black men is ridiculous. It doesn’t pass the smell test. There are ALOT of sisters w/white boys. So Obviously, they are a viable alternative. But even some white boys don’t want to be bothered. Everyone, in fact, seems to fair better than black women in relationships — why is this? I don’t know, and I don’t pretend to know.

The stats are interesting, but they don’t tell us some important things. Like, this 42% of black women who won’t/don’t get married — are they heterosexual? Do they even WANT to be married? And once you count out the women who don’t like men, who are under-educated, who have multitple babies by multiple (3 or more) men, are the rest even marriageble? If these practical matters be the criteria, that is. This does not account for all the angry post-feminism black "feminists," who are only marginally eligible, if that. Gender, in and of itself, does not make you wife material. Once you weed through the numbers, you realize that the ratio of marriage black men to marriage black women? ABOUT EVEN.

I think there is something happening in the socialization of some, SOME black women that hobbles their marriageablity — and I talk about that a bit in my book "The Denzel Principle." I don’t have any answers, but I try to give you alot to think about.

Talk about it on HEF – Hudlin Entertainment Forum

"Light skinned" and "no dialect"

When we thought we had buried such offensive terms as mulatto, quadroon and octoroon and the skin-hue bigotry that spawned them, here comes the senior senator from Nevada.  In holding “light skin” and the absence of a “Negro dialect” as necessary qualifications for Senator Barack Obama to run successfully for president in 2008, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada offered up a rank insult to his colleague from Illinois.  Senator Reid has rightly apologized to President Obama, but doesn’t seem to have contemplated how hurtful his words might be to those millions of African Americans who are not “light-skinned.”  One wonders if he had seen the First Lady and her mother at the time of his remarks.
 
Incidentally, if an ethnic or regional “dialect” disqualifies a citizen from running for our country’s highest political office, then Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter were monumental frauds.  What about the late Senator Strom Thurmond from South Carolina who ran as a independent candidate for president in 1948?  His Southern accent/dialect was so deep that it was, at times, almost indecipherable.

Talk about it on the HEF – Hudlin Entertainment Forum